Hopefully others will chime in, this is just a ramble about what I've found works and doesn't work with various razors, general metal objects, and plastics. Disclaimer: I am not an expert in anything but computers. I'm a jack of all trades/Renaissance Man only. I don't know why some of this stuff works, it's been trial and error, and all I can make is guesses after the fact. Don't try this at home, four to six weeks for delivery, batteries not included, not responsible if this makes your eyeteeth come out or other adverse effects. Tools. Liquids - Light oil (sewing machine) Not quite as light oil (mineral oil) Dawn ultra dish detergent (blue) SC-1000 (Surfactant. Still haven't found a source for it retail, and I'm not really ready to buy it in 55 gallon drums for resale) Scrubbing Bubbles (or clone) Tap water Alcohol (91% isopropyl and Anhydrous) Wrights Silver Polish Brasso Flitz Metal Polish (some people use others, such as MAAS or Mother's Mag Polish) Polyacrylic/polyurethane/nitrocellulose varnish Solids - Bar soap (Helps with toothbrush to do quick cleans. Not Lava) Toothbrushes. Old/new doesn't matter. I have some children's toothbrushes, adult size, and some I've cut off most of the handle. Nylon bristle brush - larger and stiffer than toothbrushes. You can also get an electric tile brush Ultrasonic cleaner (with heat) Long Blunt tweezers (for UC) Meguilar's GoldClass Carnauba PLUS Premium Paste Wax S.C. Johnson's Paste Wax stainless steel jeweler's pick. (used for moving diamonds and other stones around) Jeweler's loupe Heater Tools I'm either making or in the process of obtaining, plus rationale behind them Natural bristle brush - round head, smaller than toothbrush. Will be making out of "Roof Brush". Also Acid Brush, etc. Nylon doesn't split well, and doesn't hold materials. With a 'natural' bristle, I can use a polish 0r jeweler's rouge to buff stains and rust marks out of small corners. (I'd try jeweler's rogue, but then it'd make off with the razor) Clock oilers. Built to hold oil until you have it to the teeny tiny part you actually want to oil, rather than dripping it everywhere. Drying/rinsing rack. ---- Cleaning process for a simple razor, for me. (Say, a three piece Tech, or SuperSpeed) Take ultrasonic cleaner. Add water, put in Dawn and SC-1000. Heat water until warm, fire up ultrasonic cleaner with NOTHING in it but the cleaner, and fire it up for 10 minutes. This degasses the water, making cleaning work better. Drop razor(s) into water. Wander off for half a hour or so for them to soak. Come back, fire up heat to warm water back up, and hit the razors with 8 minutes of run (max for this device.) Wander off again. Come back. Sometimes, at this point, I'll let them soak overnight. In morning, heat the water, and run it again. ----- This is a per razor routine. Every razor is different. I've had a couple that a couple of minutes in the cleaner got them as clean as they were going to get. I have several adjustables that are on their third 'once a month' round of soak/clean/oiling. Caveat - do NOT do all of this with aluminum razors. Aluminum is a wonderful metal, but it does not really like detergents very much, especially if the anodized coating is penetrated. I've put aluminum in to soak in Dawn for two or three hours, and I find weird little white towers forming over those pits. Many surfactants also hate aluminum. (Aluminum and Titanium are nymphomaniac metals. They bond with anything). So, minimize your soak times with aluminum, and rinse well between soaks. ----- Once I've decided that the ultrasonic cleaner has done enough (sometimes I'll pull some out midway, let them drain, scrub with toothbrush, then put back in), I'll remove the razors from the bath and run hot water over them to rinse. With complicated surfaces (adjustable, superspeed), I usually empty out the cleaner, rinse it, re-fill with plain water, heat it up, and repeat the initial degassing and cleaning. That vibrates out all the little crevices and does the best job of rinsing I can come up with. So, now I have a well rinsed razor. If it's a simple one, I just dry it. (You can also rinse them out with alcohol afterwards, to try to help remove excess water.) If it's complicated, I'll blow out what I can (carburetors are like this, fountain pens, etc), and put the metal parts on a washcloth, then run a space heater on low over them. This is especially important with hollow items, such as tech/old/NEW handles, and insanely important for Zamac alloys. Basically, I'm accelerating the evaporation process. (DON'T put the heater against the cloth. Just... don't. It's stupid. You can also put the razors directly on tile, then put the heater near them. Even the cloth, when I use it, is on tile, so what fire risk there is is negligible. ) Try not to use your mouth to blow things out, especially if you want to sell/trade them. Your breath isn't pure. Once dry, I let cool overnight. Then I oil them. You may cry "Why are you oiling the razor, it's lived for 9,000 years without it, so it's good enough without!" Well, no, it hasn't. If it was owned by someone that cared for it, it was oiled periodically when cleaned. If it wasn't, there's all sorts of crud _still stuck in there_. You can soak for months and it'll still be stuck. Ask @Tiredricefarmer about the razor he just received. Mechanically, it works great now - but it didn't move at all when it was being cleaned the first two times. What happens is that the soap and creams, which are basic, creep into the tiny crevices of everything. They can end up in the threads, in the barrel of the handle, in the rotating mechanism of the knob or adjustment ring. .. I say can, they _do_. What I've discovered is that by oiling them thoroughly, even to the point of oozing out and having to be put on paper towels for a while, the oil soaks into the hard plaque that's coating the razor. Wait a week, then drop them back into an ultrasonic bath, and you get streams of 'stuff' come out. Part of that is the oil being driven out - but it's taking extra crud with it. It's safer for the metal than leaving the entire device soaking in water for weeks. I just took a completely 'clean' Fatboy, which had been run through the process just last week, and dropped it back in the cleaner. The liquid is foggy (the oil), but the bottom of the UC is coated with fine particles. Once the guy is dry, this time, I suspect that it'll move better than it did when it was oiled before, which was darned good. Now, if you'd like to be absolutely paranoid, put some hand soap with triclosan into the water, after it's been degassed. It won't foam up, but it will dissolve into the water, thus killing most bacteria that's managed to live through the soap and everything else. (I tested this while writing this post) ---- Scrubbing bubbles. I only use this at the very beginning, and only to help knock off the really obvious stuff, or loosen things stuck in tines. It's not as helpful as people would lead you to believe. It also doesn't directly eat gold plating, but it DOES eat the nitrocellulose lacquer protecting that plating. It DOES, however, eat whatever the gold paint is that Soluna used on their aluminum razors handles. I mean, just makes it run off like fresh mud under a stream of water. Plating and ultrasonic cleaners. I've put a 90 year old gold plated adjustable into the cleaner and not had a problem. I also didn't soak it. Keep in mind that the lacquer is plant based, so it will come off when soaked in water. If you want to keep the surface as original as possible, don't put it in water for more than a few minutes at a time. If you want to strip it off, soak it for a few days, then hit it with the ultrasonic cleaner. It'll peel right off. Nickel plating - I haven't had any plating pop off unless it was right around an already damaged area. That means that the plating was already compromised enough that the cavitation could form _underneath_ it. Like Zinc Pest. Once that compromised plating is gone, the plating 'stripping' stops. Plastic and ultrasonic cleaners. Heat is probably the biggest thing to worry about here, but I doubt that you'll manage to damage the plastic before the water boils over Some plastics are adversely affected by alcohol, or even water. Casein plastics cannot take water, other than being wiped. Celluloids shouldn't be soaked. Bakelite doesn't seem to give a crap. Modern plastics are fine. The plastic scales on a Victorinox Swiss Army knife will dissolve under alcohol, just like an old 78 RPM record. (using alcohol on something, then picking up the knife, can leave a nice fingerprint in the plastic) ---- All of the other stuff that I listed? It's not absolutely necessary if you just want a clean razor to use. If you want a fantastically polished razor, use the rest. Weirdly enough, there are things that coat razors that often will not come off with a toothbrush or the UC, but will scrape right off with your fingernail. You just have to try things and see what happens. The waxes? Well, whatever 'polymers' Meguilar uses in that particular wax is really good at taking off tarnish without damaging already damaged plating (well, any more than any rubbing will). I have a NEW LC that I polished up, and then coated with three coats of Minwax water based polyacrylic. It's now on the third week? of being coated, and is not showing signs of corrosion. For comparison, I have another NEW that the bottom part of the handle was polished (missing plating), and it has fully corroded twice and been re-polished as a comparison. Same damp environment. Benefit of polyacrylic is that you don't have to buff the finish between coats. Downside is that it's not as flexible as urethane. Polishes - that's for after you've done everything else you want to do to the razor. Remember to protect after polish with a good wax, coating, or be ready to polish the brass spots weekly. --- yes, I realize this is disjointed, but I didn't actually plot this out, just wrote it as I went along. If there's a request, I'll create it as a formatted document with better information/links/etc.
Very nice article. Disjointed is not necessarily a bad thing. I gleaned a lot of useful info from it. Thanks for taking the time to put it together!
I just spent a while cleaning an aluminum handle blue knob superSpeed, blue lady gillette, and a black handled superspeed, so this came out while I was doing it.
No questions? Suggestion on how other people clean things? I have a set of five cruddy razors coming in soon, so there'll be some photos and documentation coming up in the next week or two as I see if I can make them functional. A NEW Common Bar, Schick Krona, Zamac Gillette Tech, 50's SuperSpeed and an AutoStrop. What I'll do with THAT one, I don't know. Probably dump it in a box with the GEMs.
I have always used dawn and scrubbing bubbles and an old toothbrush. Works well, cheap, easy, and most have these items under the sink already. I can tell you what NOT to do... Vinegar. I picked up a very crummy L4 slim for only a few bucks and knew that a little elbow grease would clean it up. I used the dawn and bubbles and most of the crud came off as expected. There were some tenacious deposits on the head that were not responding to this. I figured a vinegar soak would do the work for me. I have had luck cleaning hard water deposits and soap scum in the shower with it, so I it would work for a cruddy razor. Into a glass with some vinegar and goodnight. Zzzz. I planned to finish cleaning it the next morning but that didn't happen. ...or the next day, or the next. I finally remembered it and the deposits were gone! Yay! It worked! Clean, shiny and smells like a pickle! Then ... I noticed that the plating was gone around the handle. Right where the handle stuck out of the vinegar. The plating soaking within the vinegar was fine. The plating outside of the vinegar was fine, too. Just right at the surface caused plating loss. Lesson learned.
Interesting. However, I do see what looks like some other plating loss in the picture, further towards the knob. It shows as a degradation in the finish. I wonder what the surface reaction was - excessive oxidation at the boundary level? Don't feel too badly about the plating loss, however. I don't think I've found more than two razors that hadn't had plating loss _just from the soaps_. No hard water stains, but once the soap scum was removed, the plating was just missing. That was with no abrasives. I guess I should try posting up a pic or two from the one I sent to @Tiredricefarmer. It's amazing what can happen just by sitting.
Quick question... I just received a Clix razor with a bakelite case, baseplate, and handle. Any suggestions for how to clean it without damaging the bakelite?
Bakelite is extremely tough. It's somewhat brittle, but that's it. Soap and water works fine, and you won't find much that'll stick to it that won't come off with just soap and water. If you want to polish it - plastic polish or Flitz seems to work okay.
